Timothy O’Leary.

Timothy O’Leary

Professor of information engineering and neuroscience
University of Cambridge

Timothy O’Leary is professor of information engineering and neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. His research lies at the intersection between physiology, computation and control engineering. His goal is to understand how nervous systems self-organize, adapt and fail, and to connect these to diversity and variability in nervous system properties.

Originally trained as a pure mathematician, O’Leary dropped out of a Ph.D. on hyperbolic geometry to study the brain. After retraining as an experimental physiologist, he obtained his doctorate in experimental and computational neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh in 2009.

He has worked as both an experimentalist and theoretician, on systems that span the scale from single ion channel dynamics to whole brain and behavior, and across invertebrate and vertebrate species. His group works closely with experimentalists to study neuromodulation, neural dynamics and how sensorimotor information is represented in the brain, more recently focusing on how neural representations evolve over time. He approaches these problems from an unusual perspective, citing engineering principles as being key to understanding the brain—and biology more widely.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Null and Noteworthy: Neurons tracking sequences don’t fire in order

Instead, neurons encode the position of sequential items in working memory based on when they fire during ongoing brain wave oscillations—a finding that challenges a long-standing theory.

By Laura Dattaro
30 June 2025 | 4 min read

How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)

Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.

By Ashley Juavinett
30 June 2025 | 10 min read

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior

Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

By Claudia López Lloreda
27 June 2025 | 9 min listen